With constant development of communications technologies and computer technologies, people have more requirements on a network service. An efficient data switching solution needs to be designed in a data switching network, to achieve higher bandwidth utilization and a lower data transmission delay.
Currently, data switching is implemented mainly by means of an electrical switching technology or an optical switching technology. The electrical switching technology is performing optical-to-electrical conversion on a received data packet to obtain an electrical signal, parsing the electrical signal, after obtaining switching information of the data packet, exchanging the data packet to a destination port, and sending an optical signal obtained by means of electrical-to-optical conversion. Because of limitations of technologies such as backplane technologies and energy consumption technologies, the electrical switching technology cannot meet requirements on a rapidly-growing data center capacity and a low delay of data transmission.
Common optical switching technologies include optical packet switching. Specific steps are: for a signal entering an optical switching node, sending, by using a demultiplexing apparatus, an optical label carrying switching information to a switching control unit; performing, by the switching control unit, optical-to-electrical conversion on the optical label, to extract and generate a control signal; and controlling, according to the generated control signal, an optical switching unit to establish an optical link, so as to implement switching on an optical packet. The optical packet switching does not perform optical-to-electrical conversion or parse the entire data packet, thereby obviously reducing a processing delay and energy consumption, and obviously increasing a switching capacity. However, limited by a scale of an optical switch and a switching time of the switch, not switching on all data packets can be completed by an optical packet switching apparatus.